Larry, They are nice, but I like the fourth one down
(20120901-LRC70339.jpg) the best. Just something in the lighting and
the sparkle in his eye
I had been having some mixed feelings about my Tokina 80-200/2.8.
It seemed like I just couldn't get sharp photos with it. Last
night, some friends were playing at the Trout Farm up in Zayante,
and I decided to get a little more practice with it. Since I did
manage to get a few shots, that actually were sharp, even wide open,
I realized that the lack of sharpness isn't entirely the lenses
fault. Big surprise, that I'm the limiting factor in the sharpness
of my photos.
After reading the article on sharpness in TOP, I think that a lot of
my perception of lack of sharpness is actually lack of contrast. I
think that other things also come into play, such as the difficulty
of manually focusing on moving subjects in low light. Even with a
split prism focusing screen. For that matter, even with live view
it is difficult when the subjects move faster than the latency of
the image. If I actually had money to buy glass, I'd be very
tempted to look for the autofocus version of this lens, not only
would it make focusing easier in many cases, but the shake reduction
would work a lot better too.
While f/2.8 is as fast as a zoom lens gets, I certainly notice it
being a lot slower than my primes. There were several times last
night, on TAv mode where the ISO went all the way up to 25,600.
Things also might have been a bit sharper if I hadn't left my ball
head at home and could have used my monopod.
The other thing that I've been playing with is my post processing
trick of dialing up clarity all of the way, up to the point that it
nearly looks like over done HDR, but with a lot more noise.
Interestingly, I think that when I use this trick the photos work
best when they are actually just a bit soft to start with. I'm
guessing that this is because the clarity slider does something not
entirely unlike sharpening, so if I under sharpen first, then they
don't look quite so oversharpened afterwards.
For them that care, I put the 24 best up on flickr, here they are
with the fluidr front end so you can see the exposure data:
http://www.fluidr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157631375658366/
Interestingly, 20120901-LRC70488.jpg was something like five stops
underexposed. I'm not sure how. I normally shot the drummer at
something like 1/40 f/2.8 ISO 10000, and it was shot at 1/125 f/5
ISO 125. It's a bit rough, but still a testament to capabilities of
the K-5 that I was able to get it that good.
--
Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est
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